Disaster Recovery Taken to Heart
ComputerWorld Malaysia Vol. 13 Issue No. 6
By Mario Apicella InfoWorld (US)
IF there's one trend highlighted in the recent 2003 InfoWorld
Storage Survey that everyone should take to heart, it is this:
Business continuity, taking adequate measures to recover storage
equipment from a disaster, has become part of a CTO's daily
life and is no longer an afterthought or a placebo to pacify
questioning auditors.
Although not all survey respondents are flying the disaster
recovery flag, an overwhelming majority-nine out of 10-has already
cemented a disaster recovery plan for storage equipment or will
have one in place within the year. These IT leaders are reacting
to the ubiquitous threat of political terrorism, which joins
the ranks of an already exceedingly long list of dangers including
natural disasters, utility grid failures, catastrophic accidents
and human errors.
As the centrepiece of any business continuity plan, protecting
storage equipment and company data from disruption requires
a thoughtful blending of storage administration, risk assessment
and data protection activities. Survey respondents are tuned
into that nugget of wisdom-60 per cent of the IT leaders we
polled are involved in both defining disaster recovery procedures
and purchasing storage solutions.
It may be stating the obvious, but the most effective way to
preserve critical company data is to create copies-either online
or on backup media-in case the original becomes corrupted or
unavailable; this implies a need to stock up on additional storage
devices to host those replicas. As a result, developing proper
backup and disaster recovery strategies is the driving factor
for new storage acquisitions among survey respondents, with
backup projects ranking first at 69 per cent of respondents
and disaster recovery third at 57 per cent (the latter is slightly
behind the voracious requirements of hosting e-mail databases).
A speedy data recovery is essential to getting your company
quickly back in business after a failure. Also, if your backup
copies are spread across different media formats, rebuilding
the online databases can be more time-consuming and complicated.
When it comes to the media that respondents are using or planning
to use for their backup chores, they prefer established formats
that offer more capacity and performance. Quantum DLT (digital
linear tape) and Super-DLT cartridges are used by 58 per cent
of respondents, who seem to appreciate the performance, capacity,
and backward-compatibility of that line of tape drives. Moving
down the food chain to more compact media, 27 per cent of respondents
has deployed 4mm tapes and a good 20 per cent use the 8mm Sony
AIT (advanced intelligent tape). Only a small percentage of
respondents has chosen the LTO (linear tape open) or other tape
technologies. But the real scoop is that a whopping 37 per cent,
the second largest group, has already deployed some form of
online backup using disk drives rather than cartridges as media,
and 24 per cent plan to deploy a similar disk-based backup solution
within the year.
It's fair to infer from these statistics that IT managers are
pairing traditional tape-based backup devices with faster and
more flexible disk arrays that also reduce the possibility of
operating errors (because there's no manual handling of media)
and faster restore time. Moreover, this trend indicates a departure
from a persistent (and altogether confused) belief that archive
copies and temporary duplicates of data have the same requirements.
There is a big difference between a copy of a database, such
as the general ledger database, made before major software updates
and a copy made at year-end book-closing. The former has a short
lifespan and more pressing recovery timing that are better served
by a disk-based solution, while its regulations-mandated, longer
retention time make the latter a proper candidate for tape storage.
When we asked survey respondents if they had short-term plans
to deploy nearline storage solutions to simplify their backups
and speed their restores, the answer was yes from 65 per cent
of respondents, which essentially confirms and extends the disk-based
backup trend emerging from responses to the previous question.
Fast data recovery is essential for any business recovery process
because it minimises the worst consequences of downtime, including
a tarnished image and financial losses for your company. However,
protecting data with fast online backups does not prevent disruptions
such as those caused by a failing server. If your data is on
storage devices that are tightly wired to that machine, a lengthy
recovery can still take its dreadful toll on your business.
To achieve the greatest flexibility and fastest data recovery,
your servers and your storage devices should be in different
boxes and accessed via a network rather than inflexible connections
such as SCSI cables. Inevitably, the subject of storage recovery
leads to a networked storage solution such SAN and NAS. The
networked storage approach may be more expensive, but it offers
an undeniable advantage: A broken, data-less server can be easily
and quickly replaced with a standby unit that accesses the same
data of its clone over the network.
That simple truth did not escape our respondents, 75 per cent
of whom concur that improved backup and disaster recovery capabilities
are the main motivations of their SAN project, whereas 71 per
cent give the same indication for their NAS deployment.
When it comes to business continuity and backup recovery strategies,
the 2003 Storage Survey respondents draw their own, inescapably
logical, conclusions: Data recovery must be an integral part
of the storage system design and fortified with resilient, flexible
technologies such as disk-based backups and networked storage.
CTOs should conduct critical reviews of their infrastructure
and suggest technical improvements that maximise data recovery
and storage flexibility. Deploying networked storage and defining
businesswide data recovery strategies should be top priorities.
|